I don't know what you just said because I was thinking about Batman

Speaking of which, this was published mere days before our offer on the house was accepted. It seemed terrifyingly relevant.

Why this blog has sucked a bit more than usual lately

I'd hate for people to get the wrong impression -- that the appearance of the Mark Steyn fan club a few weeks ago had somehow cowed me into silence -- so let's clear the air, if you don't mind a little explanation for why the blog has not been my #1 priority for the last while.

Well, let's start with an addendum to this post: yes, I finished my coursework for my masters degree many months ago, but there was still a substantial assignment left to do: in the case of my degree, a 40+ page reported feature-style article that involved many hours of interviews, months of research, and a hard drive failure which caused me to lose most of my data at the worst possible moment. Writing this article -- which I have finally finished as of a few days ago -- has taken much of my waking moments for the last few months.

Most, but not all. Because at the beginning of that work, I decided that I owed it to Vicki to finally start getting serious about planning our wedding. She's a sweetheart, so I'm sure she would've waited longer if I'd asked her, but she's already exhibited the patience of a saint, and I make it a rule not to try the patience of saints.

Oh, and as my degree winds down I'm trying to find a job. So, there I was, in early August, trying to find a job, finish a masters degree, and plan a wedding, when Vicki and I did what you would expect of two people who clearly already had enough on their plates: we bought a house. If you haven't done it, I wouldn't actually recommend the process except for the reward at the end. Actually, it's kind of like a wedding in that sense, or a masters degree.

So my apologies for not being able to comment on the insanity of the American health care debate. Not that I have much to add -- death panels? Are you kidding me? -- but one of my whinier friends has complained about this particular field lying fallow too long.

Reasons why this blog will continue to suck for some time to come: I now have to fix up our new place, pack up our old place, and move. Oh, and find a job.

Did I mention the job bit?

"We could use gryphons and we don't. That's what separates us from them."

Heard something about this on the news...

I have nothing much to say about the death of Ted Kennedy, except that if I had been the youngest brother of men like JFK and RFK and had started losing my elder brothers to violent deaths when I was 12, and had lost all of them before my 40th birthday, I suspect I probably would have had a long struggle with alcohol and a failed marriage.  Indeed, I suspect those would have been the least of my problems.

Unlike Ted Kennedy, I'm not sure I would have come back from that.  The usual suspects will make their usual noises about Chappawhatsits, and it's true that he had the career he did because he was a Kennedy first. But many men have been blessed with more and parlayed it in to far less -- see Bush, George W.

So thank you, Senator Edward Kennedy.  Rest in peace.

Quick shots

• There is something about owning a car that all too often leads to sociopathic behaviour.
• On that topic, could we maybe give cyclists even 1/20th of the space to park that we devote to cars?
• This list makes me think I am officially an adult, and thus sad.
• The oil industry continues to be evil.
• On a related note, methane continues to seep from the arctic. In brief, we're boned.
• In another five years, the Russian army could suck considerably less.
• Finally, Roger Ebert shares his thoughts on AA after 30 years of sobriety.

There's virtue in brevity

Kevin Drum:

When we get to the point where one side is able to conduct war effectively with virtually no fear of loss of life, does that mean that public pressure against war will start to fade away? After all, demand curves slope downward. When war becomes cheaper, we'll get more war. Right?

Me, a few years back:

[thousands of words to say about as much]

Sometimes I'm way too wordy for my own good.

Tab-clearing

This smelled like garbage from the beginning.

A robot's Passover.

If you read this chart, and conclude "the problem with the world is that there are too many cyclists", you are dumb.

Is immigration bad for the environment? An old argument, one I tend to come down on the "no" side.

Lawrence Solomon writes something non-crazy.

Heh. His name is "Guinan".

And he's a space scientist! NEEEEEERRD.

Actually, it's a pretty interesting post at io9 talking about how our Sun is not, in fact, the ideal candidate star for the development of life. Nor, for that matter, is Earth the ideal planet. Smaller K-class stars, and larger rocky planets, seem to be better suited.

The Copernican revolution continues to keep moving us further and further from the centre of the universe.

Baby steps

Fake Nobelist Paul Krugman writes:

My guess is that the myth of the rational market — a myth that is beautiful, comforting and, above all, lucrative — isn’t going away anytime soon.

An explicit admission that yes, one of the core concepts in contemporary economics was propounded and held to be true because it was valuable that people believe it to be true.

Krugman is already further along the path than most, but it's nice to see the pages of the NYT allow a glimpse at how economics is actually practiced.

In other Krugman-blogging, check out his conversation with Charles Stross. Fun.

This blog sucks

Sorry for the radio silence, but shit has gotten kind of real in the last week, and so the blog suffers.

Or, potentially, the lack of new content makes it suck less, given my average level of production.

Authenticity in SF

The question of whether Science Fiction should have less scientific inaccuracy is kind of like asking whether it would be nice if suntans weren't linked to skin cancer: well, sure, but expecting one without the other isn't a sign of a well-developed mind. But this post made me think of the matter, and I wanted to specifically note that the recent film Moon did a passable, though not perfect, job at keeping the science plausible and serving the plot at the same time.

But everyone knows China is doing nothing to stop global warming!

BEIJING – China has taken advantage of a drop in electricity demand due to the global financial crisis to speed up a campaign to close small coal-fired power plants and improve its battered environment, an official said Thursday.

Authorities have closed power plants with a total of 7,467 generating units, meeting a previously announced goal 18 months ahead of schedule, said Sun Qin, deputy administrator of the Cabinet's National Energy Administration.

"This couldn't be done when power demand was very intense," Sun said at a news conference. "Due to this financial crisis, the power generation has slowed down, so we took this opportunity to accelerate the shutdown."

Meanwhile, in this country even slowing the pace of tar sands investment is off the table.

Against dog-whistles

The perceptive observer may have noticed that I have a bit of a thing about the use of the phrase "honour killing". The short version is this: while it probably describes certain acts reasonably well, I basically see it as a dog-whistle for the crazy right -- like "death tax" or "partial-birth abortion".

But there are words that can be both accurate and totally useless, or worse serve to obscure and confuse matters. Consider that it would be technically accurate to describe Bernie Madoff as a crooked Jewish banker, but no newspaper worth the pulp it's printed on would describe him as such, and with good reason -- Madoff's crookedness had nothing to do with his Jewishness. (Just ask evangelical Christian Ken Lay.)

The sad fact of the universe we live in is that most women who die violently, die at the hands of men they know -- husbands, boyfriends, fathers, even sons. This is true of white Christians at least as much as brown Muslims. Indeed, given that Muslims are outnumbered by Christians in Canada about 30 to 1, and that substantial Muslim populations are a novelty in Canada's history, it's a absolute certainty that acts that could reasonably be described as "honour killings" have been committed far more frequently by white Christian men. Ergo crazy, shame-driven patriarchal violence has little or nothing to do with Islam, and only a little to do with religion.

The other problem is that all of this feeds in to an increasing, and increasingly stupid, view of Muslims within western countries. Mark Steyn has never had an original thought, so it's no surprise to learn that he didn't originate the genre of "scary Muslims are outbreeding us!" horror story. What's dispiriting is that some liberal voices are busy praising a book that is, if anything, just as incoherent and factually incorrect.

But what intrigues me is how tightly coupled, but incoherent, the two concepts are. Basically, the "Eurabia" thesis says that Muslims are fertile, confident, and have a strong culture that is overtaking Europe's, but the "honour killing" thesis says, effectively, that Muslim men are brittle, petty, and prone to avenge perceived slights with disproportionate violence.

None of this is any more illogical than we've come to expect from the Right. It's just a shame that when it comes to idiotic moral panics, too many lefties are busy joining them.

I doubt your sincerity

ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- A driver, now identified as an Asheville firefighter, shot a bicycle rider because he was angry the man was riding with his child on a busy road, Asheville police said.

The shooting happened Sunday morning on Tunnel Road.

Officers said the victim was riding with his wife and had his 3-year-old son in a child seat attached to his bicycle when a driver approached him.

Police said the driver, Charles Diez, claimed he was upset that the victim was bike riding with his child on the heavily traveled Tunnel Road.

Diez pulled a gun and opened fire, hitting the victim in his bicycle helmet, according to police.

Nothing says "I'm concerned for the safety of your child" like firing a weapon while enraged and, by all appearances, crazy.

Love to see what the guy's attorney tries to do with that.

Going to the wall for 6,000 people?

The government of Canada is going to the WTO to try and coerce Europeans to buy seal products? I'm not the only one who thinks this is insane, right?

I can't wait until the next time Canada tries to lecture the Japanese at the IWC. Our government is going to spend millions -- in all likelihood, more than the seal hunt brings in on a given year -- to defend part of the income of 0.02% of the population of Canada. (Seriously: WTO challenges are decidely not cheap.)

Is it out of the question for the sealers to find another customer, on their own dime?

Blogging without self-indulgence is like water without wet

I'd like to take a moment to note my father's (probably temporary) retirement.  He's left a line of work he'd been in since before the last US helicopters left the embassy in Saigon[1], and he's the kind of guy who marks important moments in his life that way -- so I come by it naturally.

He really left it all on the road -- as of 5PM yesterday[2], he was still corresponding with colleagues, as if he was going to find some last little gem to put out before he left.  I think I probably would have just run out the clock starting sometime in June.

Congratulations, dad.  Even without a job you're still wealthier than me, so dinner's still on you for a while yet.

[1] Stories have been told, multiply.  (Of course, by the time the US diplomats returned to Vietnam, the embassy was moved to Hanoi, and Saigon was called Ho Chi Minh City.)

[2]  Seriously.  I've seen the emails.  I'm relatively certain they weren't being sent from a movie theater, this time.

Tab-clearing

Marcus Gee, after too long, finally pens a sensible column.  Still gives no evidence of picking up a phone.

George Lucas ruined this young man's life.

Colour-tunable OLEDs can match sunlight's feel.

Climate change will cause civilization to collapse.

On a related note: what will the climate deniers say when 2009 ends up hotter than 1998? Something even stupider, no doubt.

Finally, while this story was generally interesting, I object to the conflation of divorce and war as similar childhood traumas.

Happiness, now in blog form

Rob Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money is a daddy times two.

Speaking as one half of an unmatched pair, I don't know whether the appropriate reaction is "congratulations" or "you poor bastard." My parents would have more precise input, but I think time (and the fact that they no longer have to feed, clothe and house me) has clouded their memories.

Man, it seems like a lot of people I know are having kids lately. And just yesterday, my dad's all like "being a grandparent is so much fun... no pressure."

In praise of the National Post

For being the only newspaper to play it cool on this Kingston-Canal-Murder story. Basically, the facts are that after an almost month-long investigation, a muslim husband and wife and their son are being charged with murdering their three daughters and the husband's first wife.

The police, when asked, have specifically refused to use the words "honour killing", and good on them for doing so. The last thing a case like this needs is the use of inflammatory words, especially when the investigation is ongoing. So what do the brain trusts at the Toronto Star run as their web headline for the story? This:



Meanwhile, the Globe headline sticks to the known facts:



But the Post gets singled out for praise because not only does its web headline keep things cool:



But it deals with the honour killing charge briefly and factually:

A second vehicle, a Lexus, which had been driven back to Montreal by the girls' brother, has been linked to the crime scene, police said.

They would not confirm media reports that the deaths were part of an "honour" killing.

And, appropriately given the inherent speculation of the charge, puts it right at the bottom of the story.

So here's to the Posties! Just because I don't say it much, doesn't mean I don't like being able to say it every once in a while.

If we can land a man on the moon, why can't we land a man on the moon.... again?

One of my earliest memories involves the space program. My parents, believing it would do me good, had placed me in a Catholic school during the first few years of my academic life. These years corresponded with the early years of the Space Shuttle launches, and one launch in particular made the news in a big enough way that even an almost-five-year old couldn't ignore it.[1]

So the next day, as the nun was explaining to us kindergartners the breadth of God's powers (everything that happens, He made happen. Next?) I asked what, to me, seemed both important and timely: Did God make the space ship blow up?

I was told that yes, of course, God made the space ship blow up.

There are two ways the rest of this story can go: my lifelong skepticism of organized religion, or my lifelong obsession with manned space exploration. Tomorrow is July 20, 2009. Which way do you think we're going?

Manned space exploration suffers from a number of drawbacks, as far as we evangelicals are concerned. The first is that it is expensive. Not "invade a country that poses no threat so we can be bogged down in a ruinous war" expensive, nor even "help out bankers who've spent years reaming us for fun" expensive, but expensive nonetheless. Optimistic proposals to send a crew to Mars run to $100 billion over 10 years, and more pessimistic analyses take in to account the fact that America's industrial base can no longer make a commercially successful car, much less a lunar lander, and come up with much higher numbers.

I'd like to see what Barack Obama has to say about Apollo 11, I really would. I think if someone can imbue this whole mess with some awe and dignity again, it would be him. But even I can't really tell you with a straight face that, on this anniversary of an enormous accomplishment, we should do it again before another decade passes. (That would make 50 years, and the likelihood of some or all of the Apollo 11 crew having passed by then is non-trivial.)

As I implied above, if we're going to light a pile of money on fire, I think the space program is one of the least obnoxious ways to do so. But even I can see that any money spent on my pet project is less money to go around for other things, like stopping the planet from dying. For example. While I don't think the fiscal reality is that a trade-off is necessary, I think the political reality is that a) military spending is sacrosanct, and unlikely to get less so, while b) NASA, as successful as it is at protecting its budget, has spent 40 years coasting on goodwill largely left over from the Apollo era.

And some day soon, the number of Americans who have no living memory of an Apollo launch will outnumber those who do.

Aside from the fiscal problems, there are some other, more intractable problems associated with space flight, especially the kind where we wrap men (almost always, penises seem to be required somewhere in the mission) in exotic fabrics and shoot them off at several miles a second. And that latter part of the process is a biggie: the amount of energy it takes to send even a minimal crew to the astronomical equivalent of the Canary Islands is truly staggering, and regular readers won't be surprised to think that I'm not certain that kind of energy will be easily available in the future -- or if it is, it won't be politically palatable to squander it on a vanity project.

So that leaves the wild cards: what happens if, say, the Bussard Fusion people turn out to be right, and we're soon deluged with all the cheap energy we joule-addicts could want? Suddenly, lofting a crew from the Earth to Mars, Jupiter, or Neptune looks positively primitive, and we can start discussing how much we want to invest in manned exploration of the inner Oort cloud. But that's basically what it will take: some kind of game-changing technology to make the task a whole lot easier.

I continue to think that the space program is valuable, and long for the days when Vicki and I can retire to our personal O'Neill colony in the sky. But fundamentally, we don't have a way of getting there from here. And in the meantime, there's important work that needs to be done planetside, first.

[1] Okay, an almost-five-year old me.